Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle (53 page)

It surprised Ned that they put Pyotr in the car with him rather than Semyon. They were in an old beige Ford Taurus that Grigori had parked in front of his headquarters in Detroit. The plan was that the group would travel over the Ambassador Bridge into Canada in separate cars and then meet at a bar in a little town called Tilbury, about forty-five minutes down Highway 401.

As they approached customs, Ned took out his Jared Macnair passport and Pyotr handed him his. The customs officer—a heavyset woman in her late twenties—looked them over disinterestedly. “Nationality?” she asked.

“Both American,” Ned replied.

“Where do you live?”

“I'm in Grosse Pointe, and he's from Southfield.”

“What's the purpose of your visit?”

“Visiting relatives. My sister married a Canadian guy and now they live in Newmarket.”

“Newmarket?” She smiled. “I'm from Aurora.”

“I'm sorry,” Ned replied. “This is my first time in Canada. I only know Newmarket from a map and from my sister's description.”

“Oh, well, here are your passports, Mr. Macnair and Mr. Taglietti. Have a nice trip.”

“Tal-yetti,” Pyotr corrected her pronunciation. Ned smiled at his pretense.

As they drove out of Windsor and into the countryside, Ned couldn't put the landscape and his vision of what Canada was like together. All his life, he'd been sold an image of Canada bursting with natural beauty—majestic mountains, rich, endless forests and crystal-clear water teeming with wildlife—but all he saw here were flat, almost uniform farms, clapboard bungalows, gas stations, convenience stores and maybe a muddy stream or two. It looked a lot like places he'd been to. And Pyotr didn't help break the boredom. Even though he had the best English skills of any of the Russians he had dealt with, he didn't have much to say. He felt no need to divulge anything about his own life and had made it clear he had no interest in Ned's. Ned found himself missing Semyon's nonstop prattle, and all he had were a steady supply of classic rock and country channels on the radio to keep him company.

They arrived at Tilbury and turned off to find the bar. When Ned saw four customized Harley-Davidsons and a pair of pickup trucks parked outside he knew who was waiting for them. He knew this area had been Outlaws territory for a very long time—which made sense because it was so close to the club's Detroit headquarters—but after some mass arrests, the Bandidos took over. But then they had an internal war with a lot of deaths and basically vanished from the area. And now, Ned was unsurprised to learn, the Hells Angels were in charge.

Even though there was little contact (or love lost) between the Sons of Satan and the Hells Angels, the presence of
any
bikers made Ned nervous. He and Pyotr were the first of their group to arrive, and Ned suggested they wait outside for the others. Pyotr shot him a dirty look and told him that it was too hot outside and that he was hungry.

Inside the bar, Ned smelled cheap draft beer and stale cooking grease before he saw the group of men gathered around a couple of tables. They had been chatting, but fell silent when Ned and Pyotr walked in. Without a second thought, Ned recognized them as bikers, but not as particularly important ones. All of them were white, some had shaved heads, a couple wore long beards and all of them had lots of tattoos, silver-colored jewelry and Harley-Davidson logos on their clothes.

The bikers scanned Pyotr and examined Ned carefully as they walked in. Bikers from other gangs were never safe in a room full of Hells Angels, especially if it looked like they were trying to make a drug deal in their territory. And considering whom he was traveling with, that could be an easily made assumption.

But then Ned remembered something. Although he had once been a prominent biker (and was passing for yet another), he didn't look like one anymore. His hair was closely cropped, but far from shaven. He had no facial hair, no visible tattoos and wore no jewelry aside from a modest watch. He was wearing a light-blue and yellow Hawkridge golf shirt and tan canvas pants. If anything, he mused to himself, he looked more like an undercover cop than a biker.

Pyotr was another matter altogether. Although his appearance raised no suspicion with the woman at customs, the trained eyes of the bikers saw more. Massive, he had a shaved head and one of those goatees fat guys grow to make their face look thinner. He was wearing a powder-blue and white track suit with a white t-shirt on underneath. Unzipped, it revealed a wealth of tattoos. And he was dripping in gold, although he had hidden most of it when he went over the border. With the jewelry back on, even a small child could guess he had something to do with the drug trade. He walked by the bikers without so much as a glance their way.

After Ned and Pyotr found a table at the other end of the room, the bikers started talking again, but in hushed tones. Ned couldn't make out what they were saying, but he knew they were almost certainly talking about them.

A few minutes passed before Grigori and a pair of his associates came in and sat with Ned and Pyotr. Like Ned, they were dressed casually and unremarkably. Grigori yelled something in Russian at Pyotr, and he looked hurt. Grigori ordered chicken wings and sodas for everyone at the table, he made it clear there was to be no drinking. About a half hour later, Semyon came in with two more men and joined them. They were dressed in much the same way as Ned and Grigori.

Semyon made an effort to sit beside Ned, but was rebuffed by Grigori. There was a great deal of discussion in Russian, and Ned waited to find out what was going to happen. Grigori gave Pyotr his car keys and the big man reluctantly went out into the parking lot. Semyon got up and stood beside Ned. He spoke into his ear,
sotto voce
, that the plan was for them to fly to Russia posing as a mixed government/corporate group heading to a conference about heating and cooling technologies in Moscow. Grigori, as vice-president in charge of technology for Premier Solutions, was leading the group. Vasilly was to be a Russian government advisor and the rest of them were engineers. Except for Ned. He was to pose as a grad student studying the differences between how the Russian and American manufacturing sectors were adapting to challenges from China and other low-wage countries. Grigori had made all the arrangements and had gotten the papers in order. And he was some pissed off with Pyotr for not dressing the way he told him to. He was going to have to go back to Detroit. Pyotr came back in, struggling with a pile of briefcases—all them different brands—and a single backpack, which he gave to Ned.

Semyon then instructed Ned to get in his car with Vasilly and Andrei, because Pyotr was going to take the Taurus back home. Ned hoped he hadn't seen the flicker of fear dance across his face. All Semyon did was smile.

The bikers, who up until this point had been quiet, approached Semyon as a unit when he went over to the bar to settle up the tab. Ned looked over his shoulder to watch and thought to himself that it was typical of biker behavior to approach the smallest of the group when he was alone. Pissed off, he got up and joined his friend. Just as he arrived, the oldest-looking biker asked Semyon, “What are guys, some kind of terrorist cell or something?”

Semyon smiled. “No, man, we are Russians, your enemy
before
the Arabs,” he said jocularly. “We are all best friends now.”

“So you're communists?” the biker snorted, and all his friends laughed in support.

“Trust me,” Ned interjected. “These guys are the opposite of communists.”

“Who asked you?”

At that, Vasilly got out of his seat, approached the group and gently pushed Semyon aside. He looked at the big biker in the eye and sneered. Vasilly came up to his chin. He let out a little chuckle. The biker glared at him. In one move, too quick for Ned's eyes to follow, he held a pistol to the biker's testicles and a knife just under his jawbone. Ned stepped back, Semyon just smiled.

“So you think you're a big man, just because you have a weapon?” the big biker asked Vasilly. As he was finishing his sentence, the whole bar heard one of the younger bikers cock a double-barreled shotgun. The bartender hit the ground instinctively, and the waitress ducked into the ladies' room.

Semyon laughed. “No, no, no, he is very
small
man,” he said, clearly enjoying himself. “That is why he would have no problem killing you all—he has, as you say, ‘issues.' ”

“Shut up, you fuckin' commies,” the biker with the shotgun said, trying to insult them and pointing the shotgun at Ned. “Back off, or your faggot friend here gets splattered all over the walls.”

Vasilly, for the first time indicating he understood English, let out a derisive laugh.

Just as it looked like things were going to get very ugly, Grigori stood up. He faced the big biker with Vasilly and put his hand on his shoulder. “Don't worry about these boys, Zeke,” he said warmly. “They don't know who they're talking to and they get a bit nervous sometimes.” Then he and Zeke laughed.

“I know, I know. Put down the gun, shit-for-brains. These are ‘comrades' of ours,” Zeke commanded. The young biker did as he was told. Vasilly slowly followed suit. Zeke and Grigori went through a door with a sign that said “employees only” for a private conference. Ned noticed that both of them had briefcases. The bikers and Russians in the room watched each other uneasily.

After twenty minutes or so, the door opened and Grigori and Zeke came out, talking as friends. Grigori motioned for the Russians to leave. They did. Semyon and Andrei escorted Vasilly out first.

In the car—an old Lincoln—Semyon was driving, Ned was in the passenger seat while Vasilly sat in the back, reading beside Andrei. Andrei waited until they were out of town before he said, “Your friends, they are not so tough.” Then he let out a little giggle.

“Those were not my friends,” Ned replied. “If you'll remember, I was the one with a shotgun pointed at me.”

Vasilly sniggered a bit from the back seat without lifting his eyes from the page he was reading. Semyon let out a genuine belly laugh. “That's true,” he said. “The Sons of Satan no longer have much use for you.”

“Those were not Sons of Satan.”

“Who were they then?” Andrei asked mockingly. “Lawbreakers? Hells Angels? Outlaws? The Banditos?” His sarcasm escalated with each name he spit out.

“None of the above,” Ned said. “They were a puppet gang, sort of like the minor leagues, for the Hells Angels.”

“Minor leagues?”

“In sports in America, the minor leagues are where players go when they are not yet ready for the big leagues,” Ned explained. “They learn, get better and have a chance to get rich.”

“We have this in Russia too—for hockey and soccer,” Andrei said, then muttered something to Vasilly, who did not acknowledge him, but lazily turned a page in his book. “How could you tell?”

“Their tattoos,” Ned said. “They all had ‘81,' ‘Support 81' or ‘Big Red Machine' on them – that means they are a support gang for the Hells Angels, but are not allowed to have the actual words ‘Hells Angels' on them.”

“Why ‘81'?”

“‘H' is the eighth letter of the—I mean our—alphabet and ‘A' is the first.”

“Our tattoos have meanings too,” Andrei said. “But nothing so lame as that.”

“Like what?”

“Real things based in our rich tradition, not crossword puzzles clues,” Andrei continued. “A cat is for a thief, a skull means murder, different symbols mean different things. I had to laugh the other day when I saw young girl in the mall with a barbed-wire tattoo on her arm. In Russia, that means she is in prison for life.” He laughed. “We have real artistry. You saw the cathedral on my back? And some tattoos are not what you would call voluntary. A prison slave may get crucifix. A child molester may get dagger over his heart.”

“I like your ‘rich tradition' of thieves and murderers and child molesters, and I have to admit that we have something similar in ours,” offered Ned. “But we generally just sew patches onto our jackets for our accomplishments and affiliations.”

“You hear that Vasilly? Here, if you kill a man, you get to sew a little piece of ribbon onto your blouse.” Andrei now sounded disgusted with Ned. “We wear ours on our skin!”

“It's not like bikers are afraid to get tattoos—they get lots of them,” Ned defended his culture. “But sometimes you don't want to advertise exactly who you are in prison. Say you are in a Bandidos block and you're a Hells Angel—there would be trouble.”

“Ours are the opposite!” Andrei sounded stunned. “If I walk into prison in Russia, the Virgin Mary says I started as criminal when I was too young to decide on my own, the cat says I am thief, two skulls say I have killed two men. I
want
the other prisoners to know this. It's like a résumé. Besides, the quality of your tattoos shows how important you are. Mine are like fine art, Pyotr's are like cartoons.”